the john report

take a stand

2011-06-16T17:19:00.005-07:00

Although I've seen several standing desk arrangements around the office over the last several years, some recent post I saw about the possible health benefits renewed my interest enough to try it for myself. Before making any drastic changes to furniture at the office, I decided to jury-rig something in my home office and try it out for two days whilst working from home. Ah, Rubbermaid containers - is there anything you can't do?

After two days of trying this arrangement, I've learned the following:

All the firsthand accounts I read of people trying a standing desk arrangement for the first time are true: you do feel more alert later in the day, but your feet will hurt for at least the first few days!
Alternating between standing and sitting works best for me - so far, a ratio of 90% standing and 10% sitting every hour seems to work best.

Bottom line: worth continuing my experiment and rearranging my workstation at the office. I'll follow up with a future posting describing my experience with a standing desk over a month or so. In the meantime, have you some links with more info!

[HBR] The Many Benefits of Standing at Your Desk
http://blogs.hbr.org/your-health-at-work/2010/08/the-many-benefits-of-standing.html

[Smarterware] Why and How I Switched to a Standing Desk
http://smarterware.org/7102/how-and-why-i-switched-to-a-standing-desk#

mount usb disks using by-label

2009-09-06T07:56:00.002-07:00

When the screen on my old family laptop died a few years ago, I found the perfect use for it: as a headless server on the family network. Running Ubuntu 9.04 Server, this laptop primarily acts as a file server on the network, dishing out bits to a wide variety of clients (Mac, PC, iPod Touch and an Xbox 360). The internal hard drive is relatively small, and pretty much used only as the system drive; an external 500 GB USB drive holds data, and I recently added a second 1 TB USB drive to give the growing bit collection some much needed breathing room.

The addition of the second USB drive, however, has exacerbated an annoyance that I've suffered since setting this system up: the challenge of configuring consistent mount points. The USB drives appear as SCSI drives to Ubuntu, and therefore show up as /dev/sd* in the /dev hierarchy. Although Ubuntu magically handles recognition of the drives as they are plugged in or unplugged from the server, the drives don't consistently show up as a particular sd* device. I don't often unplug these drives, but when I do and then plug them back in (or when the system has been restarted), I have to hunt around the /dev directory, find the correct sd* device, and then manually mount the drive. With one drive, I could easily tell which sd* device had just been added to the system: with two, it became troublesome enough that I searched for some better way to handle my USB drives.

Luckily, I quickly stumbled on this howto article describing a hierarchy under /dev that I've never explored before: /dev/disk (argh!). In a nutshell, labels and other identifiers associated with filesystems on attached drives can be used to consistently reference those drive and mount them. Better yet, I discovered that the volume label on my FAT32 drives was automatically recognized, making the mounting operation as simple as shown by the example below:

mount/dev/disk/by-label/jukebox/mnt/jukebox

Since the drives can be referenced in a consistent manner, I've *finally* been able to add them in fstab, making mount and umount operations *much* easier to deal with!

HN reader survey results

2009-08-28T22:18:00.005-07:00

UPDATE: the charts below are smaller than I'd like, so I've posted full-sized versions in a Picasa Web Album if you'd prefer to view something larger.

I've been a fan of the Hacker News aggregation web site ever since I discovered it, and I was intrigued by the quick survey that Dave Lyon posted to HN in order to gather data for a class in machine learning algorithms. In a little more than a day, Dave collected more than 2000 responses, and posted a page pointing to the data collected. Jon von Gillem noticed that the standard charts generated by the Google Spreadsheets survey were fairly simplistic, and crunched the data to squeeze out some histogram and scatter plot goodness.

I've started learning more about R recently, and since I learn best by doing, I decided to take a crack at analyzing the data using R. I quickly abandoned the standard plotting package in favour of the excellent ggplot2 package by Hadley Wickham, which made even the somewhat complex colour scatter plots below easy to generate. Before crunching the data, I removed some of the more "suspect" submissions, and in the end decided to remove submissions with reported income > $200k to better highlight the majority of submissions in the scatter plots below.

The following histograms provide a more detailed profile of HN survey participants by age, income, years in their industry, and hours worked each week. I find the age histogram particularly depressing, as I'm definitely in the long tail of the chart. I wonder why there are so few older geeks? Perhaps we disappear in some Logan's Run-esque fashion?

I was curious to see what relationship there might be between some of the variables captured by the survey, and decided to test how income and hours worked each week. The scatter plot below does suggest that those working 20 hours or less during the week earn less than those working more hours in the week, but working more than 40 hours a week doesn't appear to dramatically increase income.

I also wanted to test the relationship between age and income, but group the data by factors such as education and type of employment to see what impact such factors had. I used the spiffy capabilities of ggplot2 to quickly generate the two scatter plots below. To my (admittedly aging) eyes, no patterns immediately jump out - perhaps generating separate scatter plots by the factor elements would help highlight any patterns that may exist.

I've made available the survey results data (filtered to remove both suspect entries and entries with income > $200k) that I used in my analysis if anyone is interested in crunching the data themselves. If you do find something interesting, be sure to drop a note in a comment to this post!

cmd key confusion

2008-05-25T15:55:00.004-07:00

When I picked up an old 12" PowerBook G4 last fall (just in time for the launch of Leopard!) I wondered how long it would take to become familiar enough with keyboard shortcuts under OS X such that they'd become reflex actions. Not long at all, as it turns out - especially once I worked out that the Command key on a Mac is similar in concept to the Windows key on a PC.

After several months of switching between Windows PC (at work) and a Mac (at home), I find the daily transition fairly seamless - with one exception. I use keyboard shortcuts fairly often when browsing, especially to jump to the browser Search and Address fields. Jumping to the Address field in Safari is Cmd-L, so after an evening of web surfing I find the first thing I do the next day at work on my Windows PC is hit the Windows-L key combination - which logs me out. It's been months now, and I still do this every two or three days! Argh!

ted, this case is closed

2008-05-18T15:42:00.006-07:00

I've been excited about receiving a TED 1001 home energy meters for two weeks now. I downloaded and skimmed through the TED manual to see what the installation requirements were. I Googled online forums to learn how I might connect the TED display unit to my home Linux server and archive energy data. On Thursday, I received a new TED on loan that I could use for the energy efficiency experiment I had in mind. Even better - with the Victoria Day long weekend, I figured I had plenty of time to install the metering unit and test out communications over the power lines to the display unit.

Then I opened my electrical panel and found this:

The main service conductors come into the panel from the top left, just below the yellow sticker. These bad boys are thick and sturdy, and placed far too close together for me to get the CTs clamped on. Better yet, I can't de-energize these cables in order to feed them through the CTs - that would have to be done on the BC Hydro side of the circuit.

So that's it - the monitoring experiment case is closed. BC Hydro does offer reasonable historical billing data, however, so I may still grab coincident weather data and run a quick model to check the efficiency of my home. The TED will be passed on to some lucky colleague at work to play with - I hope their electrical panel is easier to work with than mine!

email purgatory

2008-05-09T06:15:00.002-07:00

As mentioned in a previous post, I'm a fan of desktop search engines like Google Desktop. With files at home and at work numbering in the tens of thousands, I can't imagine any other way of quickly finding what I'm looking for. I often still organize files into directories by project or category, but also often find that even if I remember exactly which folder I've placed a file in, it's faster to retrieve it via search rather than drill down five folders to get it.

I used to have rich hierarchies of folders for storing work email messages, but now I rely primarily on just two - Keepers and Purgatory. The vast majority of messages I receive at work are either (a) messages I can scan and delete immediately, (b) messages I wish to keep for reference forever, or (c) messages I wish to keep for reference but which have a limited "shelf life". The realization that this third "Purgatory" category exists has helped me prune down my inbox tremendously. I found that I wanted to keep many messages with information that was useful over a span of weeks or months, but that after that period, the information was "stale" and no longer needed. I now drop such messages into the Purgatory folder, which has a simple Outlook archive rule - delete all messages older than 6 months. This sliding 6-month window lets me keep messages while they are useful and prunes out those that are not.

A final note - a number of new tools are arriving to help people organize and find their email, one of which is Xobni, an extension for Outlook which uses social connections gleaned from your email to help you find messages and information about contacts. The Xobni Insight extension beta recently went public, but I had a chance to participate in the private beta a few months ago. My verdict? Although the organization by social context was cool and the email stats were spiffy, I still found my self gravitating towards Google Desktop to find messages. If I wanted to find a recent message from Joe, I found it faster to hit CTRL-CTRL to bring up the Google Desktop search box and type "from joe" rather than find the contact in the Xobni sidebar in Outlook.

franken-coder

2008-05-04T06:36:00.002-07:00

My first computer (everyone has impossibly fond memories of their first computer, don't they?) was a Radio Shack Colour Computer. With 16k of RAM. For the kids out there, that's not a typo - I'm talkin' 16 kilo-bytes of space to drop code into. Friends helped me double that to 32k by piggy-back soldering additional DIP-style RAM chips on top (except the address/strobe pin - that we bent and connected to some address/strobe line on motherboard). Yup - those were the days...

The reason I wanted a computer in the first place was so that I could code - I'd been fascinated with the concept of creating my own programs ever since buying a book on programming in Basic and reading it cover-to-cover the year before. I messed around with several little programs from that book (like Hunt the Wumpus) but the program I was most proud of creating was a Tron-style light cycles game for two players. I remember it taking forever to get several timing delays just right!

I never really coded much after leaving high school. Sure, there were Fortran and Pascal and other courses that were part of the standard engineering program, but those courses were never fun in the way coding the Tron light cycles game was. Assigned projects were just that - assigned by someone else, to write a program that didn't "scratch an itch" that I had myself.

The release of Google App Engine has sparked my interest in programming again, especially a style that I'll call franken-coding. I expect many see cloud platforms such as GAE as low-cost ways to host the comprehensive applications that they wish to write and deploy. I'm more interested in the new kinds of mini-applications that will be enabled by the zero-cost approach taken by GAE. Think Unix-style tools, but for the cloud - the equivalent of grep, cat, etc, but for web applications. While some folks may draw satisfaction writing everything from scratch, I'm quite happy to stitch together such mini-applications to accomplish a task.

I'm tempted to make my first GAE application a Tron light cycles game...

embedded google app engine

2008-04-12T14:27:00.006-07:00

Sometimes I get the craziest ideas whilst talking an hour-long walk by my lonesome. Here's one of them.

The recent launch of Google App Engine has all a-twitter about the possibilities offered by cloud computing - especially when the starting cost is zero. I heard the news the day after GAE launched, which means I was half a day late in trying to get one of the 10,000 accounts open during the initial beta release. I did notice, however, that anyone could download the GAE SDK, which, as one of the GAE help pages says:

...includes a web server application that simulates the App Engine environment, including a local version of the datastore, Google Accounts, and the ability to fetch URLs and send email directly from your computer using the App Engine APIs.

The SDK runs on any computer with Python 2.5 and comes packaged for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

These facts were tumbling in my mind during my walk when I switched to thinking about embedded device projects I'd like to work on sometime. I switched to Tomato firmware on my Linksys WRT54G router some time ago, and I've been interested in turning a Linksys NSLU2 (aka "the slug") into a Linux box for dedicated applications (web server, iTunes shared library, etc).

Then the statement above from the GAE help page popped into my head: "The SDK runs on any computer with Python 2.5...". Wait, WHAT? A few quick Google searches later confirmed what I expected: several Linux distros for embedded devices have optional Python 2.5 packages. Another quick check shows that the GAE SDK is less than 3MB in size.

Question: does this mean I can essentially run the GAE development environment on an embedded device? And if so, what the heck would you use that for? I'm not sure yet, but it would be fun to be one of the first to run GAE applications on my router...

the other 13%

2008-03-31T21:18:00.002-07:00

I wonder how many households in Canada have access to cable and/or satellite TV, and how many depend on over-the-air programming? Ten years ago such questions may have popped into my head and gone unanswered, but now the answer is 5 minutes away via Google.

The title of this CRTC report, "How Many Canadians Subscribe to Cable TV or Satellite TV", is exactly what I was looking for. Both Nielsen Media and StatsCan numbers are remarkably similar - something like 87% of Canadians subscribe to cable or satellite TV. The other 13% get whatever scraps are broadcast over the air.

I'm now one of the other 13%.

I had reduced my subscription to Basic cable some time ago because I found I wasn't watching any of the premium channels in the more expensive subscription packages. Today I cancelled Basic cable because I can't even remember the last time anyone in the family watched anything on any cable channel.

I haven't dropped Shaw entirely, though - they still provide me with my precious Internet link. The only way I'll be giving that up is when someone pries it from my cold, dead fingers.

tasty google bookmarks

2008-03-15T20:57:00.001-07:00

I opened a del.icio.us account as soon as I read about it, and posted my first bookmark on November 4, 2004 - an overview of 10 alternatives to the recently-killed bittorrent search engine Suprnova, as it turns out. Since that time I've continued to post my bookmarks to del.icio.us, amassing a total of 900+ to date.

I was posting a new bookmark recently when it suddenly struck me: I couldn't remember when I had last used del.icio.us to retrieve a bookmark. In fact, I view my friends' shared bookmarks on del.icio.us (via RSS) far more often than my own!

I find that I've adopted a search frame of mind for information retrieval - and not just for new material. Having used Google Desktop for several years now, I tap CTRL-CTRL instinctively to search for and retrieve documents even when I know exactly where they are. And I've increasingly used the same approach for web sites that I've bookmarked - Google search is so fast that I can jump to a well-known site more quickly than I can type the URL! There are, however, some gems in the 900+ bookmarks I've collected in del.icio.us that I've forgotten about. Many times I've "rediscovered" sites when I attempt to bookmark an interesting web site I've found, only to discover that I had already bookmarked it in the past! But I find I can't break the Google search habit I've developed, even when a quick search of del.icio.us might turn up exactly what I'm looking for.

Enter Google Bookmarks. I had given this new Google feature a try when it was first released, but found it didn't have several key features (like tagging) that made del.icio.us so valuable to me. Google Bookmarks has since added tagging, but otherwise had no additional "killer" feature to tempt me to switch. Until I read this snippet on a blog, that is.

The most important features that set Google Bookmark apart from other services is that all your bookmarks are private (nobody else can see them) and fully searchable. You are no longer restricted to the title of the page, the description and the URL - you can search the entire page.

Whoa - hang on. GB indexes all the text on all pages I bookmark and makes it all searchable? After some testing, I also found that GB bookmarks are included (and highlighted) in Google searches (when I'm signed in) and in results-as-you-type in the Firefox search box. I was hooked.

I've since switched to GB for all of my bookmarks, and now I see them pop up all the time when I'm searching for stuff using Google. Both the bookmarklet and Google Toolbar tools for bookmarking support tags and auto-suggest tags when you bookmark a page, but not at elegantly as del.icio.us does [sigh]. There's no doubt, though, that I get more out of my bookmarks now that they're woven into my "search reflex" approach to finding information.

my social outlook

2008-01-12T09:18:00.000-08:00

Email has oft times been called the "killer app" that drove exponential growth of the Internet, but I'm fascinated by how little my "email experience" has changed over the last 10+ years. My workflow for writing and reading email in Outlook 2003 at work is little different than the workflow I followed when I first started using email on bulletin boards in high school! The last major change in the way I handle email came when I switched over to Gmail for all non-work email two years ago - I now use tagging and search to manage email. In fact, Google Desktop has done more to change my work email habits than anything in the Outlook client - I use just a few folders to hold all email and simply search to find what I'm looking for.

Xobni Insight piqued my interest when I read about it in this Lifehacker posting earlier today. I've read postings in the past about attempts to apply a social network approach to organizing and presenting email, but this is the best realization of that concept I've seen to date. Xobni Insight is currently in limited beta for Outlook 2003/2007 - I've signed up and I'm anxiously awaiting an invitation to give it a try. I'll follow up with a posting about my experiences with Insight once I have it up and running.

my internet tv

2007-09-27T19:17:00.000-07:00

Several pieces to a puzzle I didn't know I was trying to solve have suddenly come together, and I'm only spending enough time to post this minimal update so that I can get back to finishing this project.

The first piece is Miro (formerly the Democracy TV project), a lovely media player that merges the play-anything smarts of VLC with the ability to slurp content from RSS feeds that use for content. When combined with a built-in BitTorrent engine, it's enough to send even the most seasoned TV studio executive to the liquor cabinet.

As one might expect, there are several sources of RSS feeds for popular (and not so popular) TV shows. The excellent tvRSS even allows you to tweak your feed so that, for example, it only contains HDTV-ripped shows. Now that's thoughtful! But a Miro "channel" created with such a feed is stark in comparison to several channels that come with the default Miro installation. Where was my show description, episode title and synopsis? Where were my video still thumbnails?

I knew several web sites offered this kind of information, but I wanted a site that offered it in a structured format - preferable, as an RSS feed. It took a while to find, but theTVdb provides all of this, and more. This site is used by several home theatre PC projects to provide metadata for TV shows captured.

But there was still one piece missing: how could I combine the TV torrent feed with the TV metadata feed to get one feed that Miro could use? I contemplated cracking open documentation pages for bash, PHP and Python to roll my own script when I remembered Yahoo Pipes. This Yahoo project is designed to slurp in structured content like RSS feeds and provides tools for manipulating the data to create new feeds! Sounds just like what I'm looking for.

Stay tuned for future postings about my antics with Yahoo Pipes...

the times is a-changin'

2007-09-18T20:16:00.000-07:00

A sign of things to come: the New York Times has decided to stop charging for the few remaining sections of its online publication that have been available by subscription only. The reason? I can't state it better than this senior VP:

The Times said the project had met expectations, drawing 227,000 paying subscribers — out of 787,000 over all — and generating about $10 million a year in revenue.
“But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, NYTimes.com.

In other words, they can make more money by attracting as many eyeballs as possible to their content (with ads) than they can by charging a subscription. Seems like advertising is being leveraged to support everything these days; I wonder what the limit is?

NYT story link (available for free, naturally).

LOLcat meets Dune

2007-08-15T07:36:00.000-07:00

Ok, it's now official: the whole LOLcat meme is out of control.

goto considered harmful

2007-07-30T12:43:00.000-07:00

Another great xkcd cartoon...

wikipedian protester

2007-07-04T10:06:00.000-07:00

Great new cartoon posted at xkcd.

checking out bytes

2007-07-01T07:47:00.001-07:00

It's always interesting to see old distribution models applied to new media, and especially humourous when those models enforce constraints that simply don't apply to bytes. So I had a chuckle when I learned about the OverDrive distribution system being used by the BC Libraries to offer audio books to patrons.

I was pleased to hear that our library system now offered audio books as a direct download (yay!) and disappointed (but not surprised) to learn that DRM was involved (boo!). The chuckle came, however, when I read this snippet from the BC Libraries web site:

"You may have a maximum of 5 titles checked out from the Digital Library.
Downloaded titles are checked out for 14 days and are automatically returned to the library."

"Checked out"? "Returned"? What, do the bytes magically travel back from my computer or MP3 player to their home servers [giggle]? Such restrictions make sense in a world where you are actually borrowing a book or physical media; as long as you have the atoms in your hand, no one else can use them. But downloaded bytes?

I doubt, of course, that our library system lobbied for these restrictions - such concessions were likely by the publishers as a key condition to making them available through the library system at all. But when the gap between the fluid availability of bytes and centuries-old distribution model designed for physical objects becomes so glaringly obvious, it's only a matter of time before someone takes advantage of this inefficiency.

foxy del.icio.us

2007-04-06T11:35:00.000-07:00

In a posting on the del.icio.us blog yesterday, product manager Nick announces the availability of an updated del.icio.us extension for Firefox. The quick tour page gives an excellent overview of the new features available, and being a del.icio.us fanboy, I had the new extension up and running in minutes. So far, I'm quite impressed with the greater integration of del.icio.us bookmarks within Firefox - my bookmarks now seem "nearer at hand" than they did when I had to jump to a separate web page to view and search them.

If you "roll" with both Firefox and del.icio.us, check out the quick tour to see if you'd like to trick out your browser with this new extension.

pity the pirates

2007-03-18T07:21:00.000-07:00

When considering the negative impact of P2P networks, it's the MPAA or RIAA that come to mind. But in the old days pirates used to steal digital bits and encode them onto physical discs for sale to consumers looking for movies, music and software on the cheap. What ever happened to them?

TorrentFreak brings a human face to the impact of P2P networks on piracy in the tale of "Tony", a working-class bloke who lived his own rags-to-riches-and-back-to-rags again story. Snippets like the following brought tears to my eyes:

By 2001, Tony was renting a factory unit and employing 3 people to operate duplicators 24 hours a day, 7 days a week but although business was lively right up to 2004, profits were being squeezed every year. Forced to increase the amount of media burnt each week to make up for the shortfall in profit, it became clear that the business was in trouble - demand was falling dramatically.

“In 2005 we shut down the factory unit” said Tony, “we just couldn’t keep going on that scale, nobody was buying anything in quantity anymore. So we closed up and moved back into a bedroom at home with my wife and her sister operating the burners, something they hadn’t done in years. They weren’t happy.”

Forget the negative ads targeting illegal downloads of movies and songs. If more kids knew how their downloading activity have affected former pirates like "Tony" and his family, perhaps they'd give up downloading and get their pirated content at flea markets instead [sniff].

jack's gift

2006-12-13T20:36:00.000-08:00

Santa, robots and the frightening year there was a Dark Christmas - what's not to like in a short story?

law of accelerating returns

2006-12-04T16:14:00.000-08:00

Some of the most mind-blowing stuff I've read in a while: click on Ray Kurzweil's The Law of Accelerating Returns and just read it.

After reading this essay, I don't doubt Kurweil's assertion that we will likely be able to probe every nook and cranny of a human brain and model it in software within my lifetime. But would such a reconstituted brain be a person? I guess it comes down to this: is there a ghost in the machine?

constituo, ergo sum

2006-12-02T07:59:00.000-08:00

Whilst reading this Wired article discussing why Google may have been willing to pay $1.65 smackeroos for YouTube, I came across what will definitely be the most high-brow groaner I'll see today:

"If you aren't posting, you don't exist," says Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO of Denuo, a new media consultancy. "People say, 'I post, therefore I am.'" Constituo, ergo sum. An interesting formulation that may well represent a new rationalism for the digital age. But for the moment, let's not put Descartes before the horse.

snow day

2006-12-01T06:28:00.000-08:00

Photo collection from our snow day...

wireless power

2006-11-16T17:42:00.000-08:00

An MIT professor presented an interesting paper at an American Institute of Physics forum this week: a description of a method to wirelessly transmit power to mobile devices. Unlike existing approaches that use inductive coupling (and normally require devices to be quite close together), this approach makes use of resonance and devices can be several metres apart.

More details are available in this MIT news release, and the paper describing the theory involved is available here.

go deep

2006-11-07T08:51:00.000-08:00

round 'em up

2006-11-05T17:21:00.000-08:00

I just gotta get me one of the EFF's "Fair Use Has A Posse" stickers! Equally as tempting would be the unusual "Andre the Giant Has A Posse" stickers... who thinks this stuff up?

bittorrent guide

2006-11-04T14:56:00.000-08:00

Still faithful to your classic P2P software, but feelin' the urge to experiment with the hot new P2P application everyone is talking about? Check out Brian's BitTorrent FAQ and Guide and go get yerself some torrent goodness...

veggie cannon

2006-11-03T19:04:00.000-08:00

I was intrigued by the concept of Make magazine the first time I heard about it. Come on: shop projects for geeks? What was there not to like?

Ditto one of the first podcasts I've seen from Make: a weekend project to build a veggie cannon . Powered by hairspray (I kid you not - could I make this stuff up?). Any description of this mighty veggie cannon that I might provide would pale in comparison to the real thing - go visit this link watch the video to see for yourself.

posting from google docs

2006-11-02T15:55:00.000-08:00

When Google Docs and Spreadsheets was announced, I couldn't resist giving it a try. The mini-tour claimed documents could be posted to your blog and carry over tags you assigned in Docs & Spreadsheets, so I thought I'd give it a go (with this posting).

speed your surfing

2006-11-02T06:34:00.000-08:00

After reading this post by NYT columnist David Pogue, I couldn't resist trying out this free web service that claims to speed up surfing by caching DNS requests. It could be just me, but web pages do seem to load more quickly now. The OpenDNS approach itself is also interesting: you tweak the settings on your home router to point to the OpenDNS service, and that's it! No software required on your computer.

Sweet.

pumpkin pie is pretty

2006-10-07T16:08:00.000-07:00

Today's john report posting is by my daughter, Katelyn (who is all of 9 years old). Take it away, Kate!

Pumpkin pie

I think pumkin pie taste good because it is vearry yummy.It is also good because pumkin pie comes from a pumkin and pumpkins are orange (and orange is a pretty colour). And that is all I have to say.

Thanks, Kate!

copyright siege engine

2006-09-26T13:02:00.000-07:00

Gizmodo has a posting that details the capabilities of the new ASUStek WL-700gE wireless router, which I can only describe as a copyright-kickin' siege engine.

Features include:

built-in 160GB hard drive
USB ports that support a number of devices (including external drives)
built-in BitTorrent client that supports up to 7 simultaneous streams
UPnP/DLNA support for sharing media content with compatible devices and software (like iTunes).

Not to put a fine point on this: you connect this puppy up to the Internet, spark up your web browser, point this router at torrents and off it goes! If it had the ability to support other software like tvRSS then you could truly use the Internet as your VCR...

top torrent sites

2006-09-25T07:40:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since my last posting (geez, this is starting off like a confessional)...

I saw this interesting post this morning reviewing the top BitTorrent aggregation and search sites on the web. Nice breakdown by total torrents indexed, average number of new torrents each day, etc - as seen by the tracking site Alexa. I've been a fan of isoHunt for about a year now - it nearly always manages to have what I'm looking for. The top rated site in the review I read, however, points to an unknown rookie - BTJunkie - as having the most torrents (and most average daily new torrents) of all the torrent sites reviewed. BTJunkie also allows you to register searches and get updates via email when there are new hits (though who knows how much spam this may generate).

compile the prime, do the time

2006-04-15T11:49:00.000-07:00

The illegal prime posting on reddit was guaranteed to capture my attention - it combines elements of both intellectual property and mathematics.

As a mind game, this one looks fun. Since it is illegal in the US of A to possess code that defeats encryption schemes that protect digital media (a la the lovely DMCA) some hackers tried thinking of some interesting loopholes. The one they have come up with takes advantage of the behaviour of at least one version of gzip - to ignore bytes after the end of a null terminated compressed file. They generated two large prime numbers that represents the DeCSS algorithm that can unlock the encryption used to protect DVD media. Unzip one number and voila! - you get DeCSS C code. Unzip another and you get directly executable code.

Now, surely knowledge of a prime number is not considered a crime? Certainly intellectual property law sees numbers (and mathematics in general) as "elements of nature", beyond copyright or patent protection, and belonging to everyone. So far, it doesn't look like this has been tested in court. Best guess is that possession of the number would not be considered illegal, but some interpretations (like the DeCSS source code) would be.

I wonder if anyone has patented this idea yet [evil grin]...

Illegal Prime [Wikipedia]

gmail switcharoo redux

2006-03-25T14:24:00.000-08:00

Here is an update on my last post with a few notes regarding the switch:

If you want to become a Gmail Masta, my young padawan, then you must become one with tools like Gmail Macros. Check out this article at Lifehacker to learn how to label and archive emails with mere keystrokes!
Once you decide to take the plunge and start working with all personal email in Gmail, you'll want access to your archived mail as well as new messages. Happily, a lot of clever people wanted exactly the same thing, and created a solution that everyone can use. Mark Lyon's Gmail Loader will intelligently import your old email into Gmail, taking care to preserve the "From:" field and submitting email in a way that allows Gmail to group it into its funky conversations goodness. Available as a Windows program and Python scripts.
The first time you want to send a message to someone, you'll want your address book of contacts from your last email client. Check out this Gmail article to learn how to import contacts into Gmail.

I sucked in several hundred archived emails into Gmail and I've been using Gmail Macro keyboard shortcuts to label and archive 'em like mad. I'm still amazed just how right Google got this email interface.

the gmail switcharoo

2006-03-23T21:30:00.000-08:00

I've enjoyed using Gmail from the first day I started, but tonight I hit a turning point: I've decided to switch to Gmail for all of my personal email.

Up to this point I've lead a dual-email-system life: Thunderbird and fetchmail on my home server for Shaw email, and Gmail for a newsletters, Google Alerts, etc. News from family, kids soccer and hockey email, etc. would hit my Shaw account, and stuff like the Gentoo Weekly News would hit my Gmail account.

No longer. I've increasingly found working in Gmail to be a breeze (especially with tools like the Gmail Macros greasmonkey script for Firefox) and working with email in Thunderbird to be a pain. Don't get me wrong - Thunderbird is a great client. There are two things, though, that it can't help me with:

Threaded conversations: related emails are shown in a timeline in Thunderbird in default. Using the topic view would only group them; nothing beats the integrated roll-up conversation view in Gmail.
Labels for email management: the family Shaw email account contains email for Kim and I (and once in a while, the kids). Guess who usually wades through it all? Since I don't want to file a message into a folder that Kim or the kids should read, I end up leaving it in the inbox. There are hundreds there right now, just waiting (in vain). The Gmail Macros let me label and archive messages with just a few keystrokes.

So how will I shift messages from the family Shaw account to my Gmail account? Easy - just flip on auto-forward for all messages. The "send from" feature in Gmail is also smart enough to send replys to messages using the "From:" address they were addressed to, so this switch will be invisible to folks sending email to our Shaw account.

One last note: although I expect it unlikely that Google will disappear anytime soon, there is always a chance that my archived email might be lost. I've configured fetchmail on my server to continue downloading email from Shaw on a daily basis as a backup. That way, if for some reason my archived email evaporates at Google, I'll still have a copy (although not as kewl an interface to it).

dark measure of technology

2006-03-12T11:55:00.000-08:00

Whilst flipping through Compusmart, London Drugs and Future Shop flyers this weekend, I was struck by just how commoditized some technology has become. Linksys 802.11b/g routers, for example, can be had for $60 CAD (after rebate) brand-spankin' new - or search eBay and get 'em for even less. The same technology from a company like Cisco, 10 years ago, would have cost thousands of dollars. And 25 or so years ago, during the height of the Cold War, well... having the same technology in your hands might have put you on a CIA or KGB hit list.

Now there's an idea for a darker kind of technology index: the likelihood that intelligence agencies 20-something years ago would have killed you for it. Measures such as processor clock speed, Mbps, etc, all have far less emotional impact. Imagine having your current home or work computer with you in Grade 9; you would have been the ultimate uber-geek, with enough computing power to render the most complex photo-realistic scenes! And enough computing power to crack the most current encryption used by both sides at the time.

Oops.

a button not pressed

2006-01-23T13:49:00.000-08:00

Wow - the hairs on the back of my neck stood up when I read this article. In short: on September 26, 1983, the world avoided nuclear devastation because one Soviet officer kept a level head.

When I was younger I used to believe that technology should increasingly replace emotional and irrational human beings in decision chains, especially those as critical as the decision to launch nuclear weapons. Now that I have a much better understanding of how technology comes to be, I believe the exact opposite. The only thing that saved us on September 26, 1983 was the judgement of one human being - an automated system would probably have launched the missiles.

Russian Colonel Who Averted Nuclear War Receives World Citizen Award - NEWS - MOSNEWS.COM

where no man has gone before

2006-01-19T21:54:00.000-08:00

The New Horizons probe lifted off safely today and is speeding towards Pluto - though it won't get there until 2015. Still, this spacecraft is the fastest one yet - it will pass the Moon later today, the orbit of Mars in about 3 months, and reach Jupiter (for a gravity-assisted boost) in February 2007. The spacecraft will eventually reach a speed of 36,000 miles per hour.

It was fun watching the launch live via an Internet video feed from NASA - kinda reminded me of the model rockets I built and launched as a kid. Only the Atlas V launch vehicle is much bigger...

your wish at our command

2006-01-10T06:20:00.000-08:00

Most of us simply fret about laws like the Patriot Act and how it seems governments like to treat 1984 as a self-improvement guidebook instead of a dystopian nightmare. In his latest posting, Tom Owad takes it one step further and scares the bejeezus out of me.

Put simply, Mr. Owad combines an old computer, several basic scripts and Amazon wish lists to build his own list of potential "subversives". After reverse-engineering the URL structure for these wish lists, he chooses a common first name, sucks in all wish lists for people with this name, and scans the lists for his selection of "subversive" texts. You know, books like Brave New World and (naturally) Orwell's 1984. And he does this using resources freely available to him, in about 30 hours total.

As always, here are some of my favourite excerpts from this posting:

Next comes the fun part – what books are most dangerous? So many to choose from. Here's a sample of the list I made. Feel free to make up your own list if you decide to try some data mining. Send it to the FBI. I'm sure they'll appreciate your help in fighting terrorism.

One curiousity revealed by this project is that there are quite a few people who show up for multiple books. Reading On Liberty and Build Your Own Laser, Phaser, Ion Ray Gun and Other Working Space Age Projects? We really should have a special list for you.

Thanks to Google Maps (and many similar services) a street address is all we need to get a satellite image of a person's home. Tempted as I was to provide satellite images of the homes of the search subjects, it just seemed a bit extreme even for this article. Instead, I opted only to pinpoint the centers of the towns in which they live. So at least you'll know that there's somebody in your community reading Critical Thinking or some other dangerous text.

I recently started to track articles I'm reading by posting them to my del.icio.us account and assigning the reading tag to them. I'm not the only del.icio.us reader to do so; a quick scan of del.icio.us/tag/reading shows many other del.icio.us users do so as well. I wonder how long it would take to scan all bookmarks marked reading for subversive texts?

web comments extention for firefox

2005-12-15T20:28:00.000-08:00

I've seen various attempts at this in the past, but the new Blogger Web Comments extension for Firefox might finally pull it off. Several past web services have given users the ability to add comments to web pages that can be viewed by all other users of the service, but these "metacomments" were stored at the service provider's site. I think these early experiments failed 'cause no one service ever became big enough to dominate the space.

This new extension, however, approaches this problem by searching the data space where many folks are already commenting on web pages: their blogs. The search capabilities of Google are leveraged to pull all blog entries for the page you are currently viewing in Firefox. I've tried it out with several web sites already and found several interesting postings already.

As an extra bonus, if you use Blogger, the little comment viewer box includes a link to let you add comments directly to your own blog! I used it to create this entry...

what am i bid?

2005-12-13T18:16:00.000-08:00

Since the beginning of time, the Deep Cove School PAC has hosted a Christmas Fair to raise funds, and this year my dear wife volunteered to manage the Silent Auction event at the fair. Which meant, of course, that I "volunteered" as well.

Like any to-the-core card-carrying geek, I immediately focused on how to apply information technology to what is normally a low-tech affair. The requirements were deceptively simple: track between 200 to 300 items, label 'em for display at the auction, and record the winning bidders for each item. This seemed ridiculously easy: set up a spreadsheet to track the items and winning bidders, and use the mail merge function of a word processor to create labels for everything. Sweet!

So as my dear wife brought in donations, I dutifully cataloged them in the spreadsheet. This was both more time-consuming and mind-numbing than I had anticipated; I have a new respect for folks that can handle hours of data entry without going mad. Even so, any time I cursed a cramped neck or aching fingers, I consoled myself with the knowledge that this effort up front would ultimately pay off. And indeed, as I generated ID labels for items and address labels for thank-you letters, the superior fire-power of IT technology over parchment-and-quill was apparent. Marvelous!

After weeks of cataloging items (and giving up more and more space in our home), it was time for the main event: the night of the Christmas Fair. As bidders filed into the room to view items, my wife and I reviewed the bid resolution strategy we had discussed several nights before. When bidding on the items closed at 7:30pm, volunteers would gather the bids (in a paper bag) for each item, find the highest bid and record it on poster paper at the front of the room. I would crank out the list of all items and paste the printout on the poster paper so that the volunteers only need record the bidder name and amount on the paper. I would also record the winning bid in my spreadsheet, so that when the room was reopened for the waiting hordes, I could quickly tell each one all of the items they had won (if any) and pass the total to the cashier beside me. Excellent!

As the evening wore on and hundreds of bidders pawed everything in sight, I began to have doubts. I was still cataloging 20 or so items that had come in at the last moment, and my wife casually informed me that we would have 30 minutes to resolve all winning bids before the hordes would stampede back into the room. Let's see, assuming the volunteers kept feeding me with data at a constant pace, 300 items in 30 minutes yields 10 items a minute, or a sustained rate of one item every 6 seconds. Eeek!

In her infinite wisdom, my dear wife drafted a large contingent of volunteers to resolve winning bids. Moving at a frantic pace, they somehow managed to find the winning bid for each item and record it on the poster paper within half an hour. Even as this effort started, it became painfully obvious that I'd have no hope of recording all the winners in the spreadsheet before the doors were opened again. I resigned myself to capturing this information at the end of the evening - the bidders would have to scan the poster paper to see if they'd won anything. Disappointment!

When the bolts were thrown back on the doors, the bidders pouring in all had the same goal: find out if they had won anything, pay for it, and get out as quickly as possible. There is no delicate way to put this: all hell broke loose. Some bidders rushed to check favourite items they had bid on, and others crowded around the poster paper, trying to find their names. Volunteers were barraged by questions from bidders, and my dear wife and I looked at each other with the same unspoken question: what do we do now? Chaos!

And yet, somehow, against all reason, the chaos assembled itself into order. Volunteers noticed that bidders were cruising the tables looking for their items, so they simply organized the paper bags (with the winning bid taped on the outside) next to the right items. One volunteer took command of the cash box, and bidders who had retrieved their items (with the paper bag as proof that they had won the item) formed a line and payed for their stuff. We matched nearly 200 items with the winning bidders in about an hour. Redemption!

All in all, a wonderfully humbling experience. At the end of the evening, we needed to note all remaining auction items and contact the winning bidders to arrange for pickup. Those of us volunteers still remaining quickly agreed on how to best accomplish this: we walked around to each item and wrote down bidder contact information using parchment and quill. Lesson noted.

the palm in my hand

2005-12-05T20:59:00.000-08:00

Doug seems to face never-ending torment with his PDA, and he asked (challenged?) me to list what I use mine for. I briefly considered creating the list on the Palm itself, but a whack to the head quickly brought me back to reality (and was likely less masochistic than actually creating the list using Graffiti 2). Anyhoo, here are some of the things I do with my Palm:

Reading articles and papers. I started with iSilo several years ago, but have been an avid fan of Plucker ever since trying it about two years ago. I use the Sunrise offline sync tool and Firefox extension to quickly grab content for Plucker to display.
Read MS Office and PDF docs offline. As I've mentioned in a past posting, Documents to Go has excellent support for native MS Office files, and the latest version adds support for native PDF files as well.
Offline calendar with alarms. The original "killer app" that got me interested in PDAs in the first place. A 15-minute alarm prompting me to get to a meeting I've forgotten about has saved me more times than I'd care to admit.
Offline Tasks with alarms. I use Outlook Tasks to track the stuff I have to get done, and alarm ticklers for these tasks sync'ed to my Palm mean I'm bugged at least three times more often than I otherwise would be. The jury is still out as to whether or not this is a good thing, and whether this has any impact on task completion rate [grin].
Offline contact list. Now what was that phone number again? With my Palm at hand, I can quickly look up phone numbers and email addresses when I'm away from my computer. Hey, Doug, it even synchronizes photos embedded in Outlook Contacts!
World clock with time zones and alarm clock. World Clock lets you set up a simultaneous display of the time in several locations around the world, and I've found the alarm clock more reliable than many of the clocks (and wake-up calls) I've come across in my travels.
Carry around pictures, audio and movies. My Palm TX does come with a reasonable amount of internal memory, but a 1GB SD card gives me the space needed to carry around some mp3 tunes, podcasts, a selection of photos, and even try out the odd video. The open source TCPMP player can handle nearly any audio/video encoding, and video support on the new iPod has done much to increase the availability of digital videos formatted for smaller screens.
Pass the time with games like Bejeweled 2 (which I'm finding to be a seriously addicting game).

On reflection, what I find most interesting is how I actually use my Palm vs how I thought I would before I got my first one. I anticipated using the Palm to manage appointments and tasks, with the potential to eventually replace pen and ink as my note taking tool of choice. Instead, I really treat my Palm as a portable viewer for documents, appointments, tasks and notes that I primarily create and manage on my computer.

[PS] If you use a blogging service or engine that is supported by Writely , consider trying it to create blog entries. I've posted my last few entries using Writely 'cause I like the WYSIWYG interface and whole-screen text area.

blogging hacks

2005-11-14T12:35:00.000-08:00

In this posting Steve Rubel describes ten favourite blogging hacks, including one I used to create this post: the online document editor Writely. This editor supports a number of features I'm keen to test out for blogging, including spell check and image insertion.

still a palm fan

2005-11-12T19:48:00.000-08:00

My first PDA was a classic PalmPilot I received for free because I saw it in a colleague's office collecting dust and simply asked to adopt it. Ever since then, I've always kept a Palm PDA within easy reach.

I've upgraded several times since that first PalmPilot (which I still have, but now the kids play with it). I moved to a Palm IIIx and used it for years before splurging for a Tungsten E2 earlier this year, which I enjoyed thoroughly until it was stolen (along with my work laptop) several weeks ago. I knew I wanted to replace my stolen Palm with a new PDA, but I first had to face a more philosophical question: Palm OS or PocketPC?

I spent several evenings googling reviews and blogs for insight, but several factors (including Doug's recent experience with a Dell Axim) helped convince me I'm really a Palm kinda guy at heart. And the latest Palm handheld definitely stole my heart: the Palm TX, with a 320x480 colour display and built-in 802.11b and Bluetooth wireless. Synchronization with Outlook calendar, contacts and tasks has always just worked, and the included Documents To Go software is widely recognized for its excellent support of native Microsoft Office files. And the combination of the open source Plucker reader and Sunrise synchronization software makes capturing web content for later reading effortless.

It didn't take me long to decide to go with the TX - I guess I'm still a hardcore Palm fan!

lest we forget

2005-11-11T08:00:00.000-08:00

I recently found an essay I wrote for some English course years ago, in which I describe some of the stories my Opa told me about his experiences in the Netherlands during the Second World War. Looking back now, I can see that these stories gave me a more comprehensive and personal look at the everyday impact that war had on the families that lived through it. Here is what I wrote in the essay about one of those stories:

One story my Opa often told me about was how my Aunt Joanne was nearly killed by an errant bullet while the family was staying in a bomb shelter. One way the shelters of the time were designed to protect their occupants was by the use of 90-degree turns in the entrance way. The theory was that all shrapnel would be absorbed by one of the walls before entering the living quarters.

As it turned out, one bullet somehow bounced its way through the labyrinth-like entrance to graze past my aunt, hit a fishbowl beside her, and finally lodged into a wall. One thing that strikes me as odd now as I remember this story is that my Opa told it in a humourous way, although I'm sure he didn't find the situation amusing at the time. I think my grandfather did this for the same reasons we all do when we re-tell a frightening experience: such stories show us how precious life really is, and how easily it can be destroyed, and humour helps us to face that fact.

Lest We Forget

serving google from victoria

2005-11-03T08:03:00.000-08:00

I never would have thunk it, but this recent post in the official Google Blog is from a guy working for Google, from Victoria! I especially like the Timbits reference he was able to slide into the post. Hmmmm, Timbits...

a new FSM believer

2005-11-01T20:26:00.000-08:00

I've been moved almost beyond words (you were hoping it was beyond, weren't ya?). After learning about the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as an alternative theory of Intelligent Design, I've become a believer.

After all, it is hard to argue with a faith where it is considered disrespectful to teach the beliefs of the Flying Spaghetti Monster without wearing full pirate regalia. Especially when there is a graph showing the statistically significant inverse relationship between global warming and the shrinking number of pirates since the 1800s. I always thought there was some kind of link, but was worried that people would find my belief crazy...

on product feature priorities

2005-10-21T07:10:00.000-07:00

I've enjoyed reading postings by Joel Spolsky in the past, but one of his recent articles had me laughing out loud. In Set Your Priorities, Joel talks about the challenge his product team faces in setting priorities for the next release of their flagship software product. He could have simply described the prioritization process they used and why he feels it was effective, but instead grabs and keeps your attention by first describing how not to prioritize. Here is one favourite snippet from his posting:

Custom development is that murky world where a customer tells you what to build, and you say, "are you sure?" and they say yes, and you make an absolutely beautiful spec, and say, "is this what you want?" and they say yes, and you make them sign the spec in indelible ink, nay, blood, and they do, and then you build that thing they signed off on, promptly, precisely and exactly, and they see it and they are horrified and shocked, and you spend the rest of the week reading up on whether your E&O insurance is going to cover the legal fees for the lawsuit you've gotten yourself into or merely the settlement cost. Or, if you're really lucky, the customer will smile wanly and put your code in a drawer and never use it again and never call you back.

I've had the opportunity to be involved in product development for a number of years now, and Joel's posting does a great job of highlighting why product development can be so gosh darned hard. I find his posting funny because it is all true. It's good to see that I'm not alone [grin].

Set Your Priorities [Joel on Software]

what would mom say?

2005-10-17T21:58:00.000-07:00

I forget how I found this older article at The Onion, but it had me in giggles this evening. What would you do if your mom found your blog? I honestly can't say. Of course, since my mom is online, and since there is a chance that one of my siblings will refer her to my blog, I'm now in the same boat as "Kevin" in the Onion article.

Some favourite quotes from "Kevin" (edited to protect more sensitive readers):

"With the raw materials in my blog, she could actually construct an accurate picture of who I am. This is f***ing serious."

"Mom loves hearing every boring detail of her kids' lives," he said. "She'd want to know what I'm eating for dinner every night, if she could. This blog is like p*rn for her."

I set up my blog to be public, and this impacts the tone of my writing here. But now that my mom might find out about my blog? I may not have the courage to ever write another entry [grin]...

Mom Finds Out About Blog [The Onion]

google reader

2005-10-09T06:38:00.000-07:00

Each time Google comes out with a new toy I find I'm adopting it in place of the software or approach I used before. Gmail displaced my Yahoo! Mail account and Google Talk convinced me to switch away from the Jabber IM system I had been playing with. And ever since I've been using Google Desktop for search and Sidebar interface I haven't looked back.

Now Google Reader is coaxing me to use it for news feeds instead of current new aggregator (the lovely Sage extension in Firefox). Ever since experiencing the AJAX-goodness of Gmail I've been curious to see how Google might apply that same approach in other applications. I've only been experimenting with Reader for a few days now, but so far I'm liking the UI approach taken. I do like the tag-based approach to organizing your feeds, but so far find the sort mechanism a bit clunky (just give me the most used tags along the top!). Still, it passed my critical test of correctly rendering my online comic feeds, so how can I complain?

I hope Google isn't secretly planning to become an evil empire anytime soon, 'cause I'm slowly getting hooked on nearly every application they offer...

flunking the turing test

2005-09-07T22:43:00.000-07:00

After the dark and serious tone of my last post, I decided a quick dose of humour was warranted. Check out “How I Failed the Turing Test” for a look at one man’s frustration at proving he is human to other humans via instant messaging.

Favourite snippet:

What really killed me was that the more I tried proving my “actual” intelligence, the more my “artificial” intelligence would get called into question. Take this pivotal conversation:

jmstriegel: no, really. I’m quite human.
jmstriegel: test me if you want
shymuffin32: ok
shymuffin32: why do you like music?
jmstriegel: hmm. i’ve never really considered that.
jmstriegel: hell, i’m not going to be able to contrive a good answer for that one. ask me something else.
shymuffin32: jeesus, you’re worse than eliza

And there you have it. I’ve been intellectually humbled by a 1960s robotic psychologist.

How I Failed the Turing Test [Jason Striegel]

oil and the end of the modern world

2005-09-06T07:24:00.000-07:00

I noticed this thought-provoking and entirely frightening paper several weeks ago, but just recently got around to reading it. In some ways I wish I hadn’t; ignorance is truly bliss.

This paper describes how everything we take for granted in our modern world is entirely dependent on oil, and then states that even slight shortfalls between supply and demand will wreak havoc on oil-dependent economies. Oil production/consumption follows something like a bell curve, and best estimates are that we’re gonna hit the peak within the next few years. It’s all downhill from there.

Some lovely snippets from this paper:

Because petrochemicals are key components to much more than just the gas in your car. As geologist Dale Allen Pfeiffer points out in his article entitled, “Eating Fossil Fuels”, approximately 10 calories of fossil fuels are required to produce every 1 calorie of food eaten in the US.

In addition to transportation, food, water, and modern medicine, mass quantities of oil are required for all plastics, all computers and all high-tech devices.

When considering the role of oil in the production of modern technology, remember that most alternative systems of energy — including solar panels/solar-nanotechnology, windmills, hydrogen fuel cells, biodiesel production facilities, nuclear power plants, etc. — rely on sophisticated technology.

In short, the so called “alternatives” to oil are actually “derivatives” of oil. Without an abundant and reliable supply of oil, we have no way of scaling these alternatives to the degree necessary to power the modern world.

All of this hit home while the family and I were visiting Barkerville (a historic mining town) during our vacation. Original buildings, daily events and lively actors are all combined to provide a reasonably accurate picture of what life looked like in the 1870s. We all had a great time exploring Barkerville, but I found my interest heightened after reading the peak oil paper. The working Cornish waterwheel display would delight any engineer-at-heart, but I found myself paying much closer attention to this power source that had nearly no dependence on oil whatsoever. How exactly did the flume deliver water to the wheel? What clutching mechanism was used to couple the waterwheel to the mine pump?

Like most teenage geeks, I read all the science fiction I could get my hands on. Writers like Asimov and Clarke described a future in which ever-advancing technology played a key role in our lives: just as often nearly wiping us out as well as granting us god-like capabilities, but always playing a key role. I’ve simply always assumed that we would eventually overcome our dependence on fossil fuels and come up with a better solution, but what if we don’t do so in time? What if we are currently living in the peak of human technological achievement, soon to descend into a Dark Ages like the world has not seen for more than a thousand years? Geez - just when I finally got my Linux server up and running the way I like it…

As a side note, I’ve been rediscovering the most excellent Connections television series again, in which writer James Burke shows the connections between different technology inflection points throughout history. The first half of the first episode, “The Trigger Effect”, is guaranteed to give you the heebee-jeebees as Mr. Burke imagines the impact that a collapse in modern energy systems would have. If someone is interested in watching this episode let me know and I can lend it to you.

So, now what? How would we cope without our oil fix? Perhaps by looking to those groups that still live like they were in the mid-nineteenth century - folks like the Amish. I’m thinking now is the time to invest in all books describing Amish tools, building and farming techniques - get ‘em from Amazon before the last spark of utility-generated electricity goes out.

Peak Oil: Life After the Oil Crash

the day television died

2005-08-13T20:37:00.000-07:00

The premiere of the new Battlestar Galactica series on October 18th, 2004, was supposed to be a straightforward affair. British satellite broadcaster SkyOne had collaborated with the SciFi Channel in the US to share production costs. SkyOne premiered the series in their markets in October 2004, but SciFi Channel programmers decided that January 2005 would be a better time to air the series in their market.

It didn’t quite go as they planned. The market for a TV series like Battlestar Galactica is decidedly geeky, and within hours of the SkyOne broadcast, the premiere episode was available to the world via the Internet. Television episodes have been distributed via the Internet before, to be sure, but the impact of this alternate distribution channel may not have been felt so keenly by traditional broadcasters. I can only imagine their horror when contemplating a world in which the time and place television shows are watched are controlled by the viewer. Doesn’t that kinda, I don’t know, destroy their existing advertising revenue model?

In his article “Piracy is Good?” (part I and part II) Mark Pesce examines the impact distribution mechanisms like BitTorrent may have on traditional television distribution models, and proposes alternatives that may work in a world where television content becomes more easily accesible via the Internet. One interesting thought proposed by Mr. Pesce is that not everyone in the existing television value chain would see a new distribution model as a bad thing:

Today the broadcaster aggregates audiences, aggregates advertisers, puts commercials into the program breaks, and makes a lot of money doing this. But — and here is the central point I’m making today — wouldn’t it be economically more efficient for the advertiser to work directly with the program’s producer to distribute television programming directly to the audience, using hyperdistribution?

This all hit home for me when the kids and I became hooked on the new Doctor Who series the BBC put together. The CBC began broadcasting episodes shortly after the BBC began broadcasting, but they were always about a week behind the BBC. We would watch some on CBC, but would sometimes miss the broadcast at 8pm on Tuesdays. I thought about setting up my VCR to capture Doctor Who episodes, but had forgotten that it can no longer be programmed to record shows. Then it hit me: perhaps the Internet could be my VCR?

So I downloaded an episode. Then two. We quickly became impatient with the time skew between the BBC broadcast and CBC broadcast; we wanted to see new episodes as soon as they were available. The episodes on the Internet were made all the more tempting because they were captured in HD quality, with all traces of commercials smoothly (almost lovingly) edited out. There is something extremely compelling about being able to sit down with the kids and watch a show when it fits your schedule.

Season 2 of the new Doctor Who series starts broadcasting on the BBC early next year. I can’t bear to think about watching it the old fashioned way.

Piracy is Good? Part I Part II [Mindjack]

windows xp confession

2005-08-12T09:23:00.000-07:00

Forgive me, Tux, for I have sinned: I’m using Windows XP as my desktop OS of choice at home, and I’m liking it. This may not be a big deal for many folks, but as a Tux-huggin’ console-sluggin’ wannabe, this affection for XP is distressing, and tastes of blasphemy.

It is not as though I’ve given up Linux completely - this blog (and several other applications) are hosted in my home office on a tired old PII server running Gentoo Linux. I’ve been running Linux on my home server for several years now, and extremely happy with it. So when we decided to replace our ancient family PC with a new notebook earlier this year, I was convinced I’d replace the pre-installed Windows XP with the latest Gentoo Linux release. Tux would have free rein in our home at last!

But from the moment I unpacked the notebook PC and turned it on, Windows XP began to seduce me. Fast user switching. USB and the built-in SD card reader, all working seamlessly. Heck, the internal wireless card works flawlessly, and I don’t even know which chipset it is using! The deal clincher, though, had to be the operational power management and suspend/resume. Support for all of these features can be accomplished under Linux, of course - you just need extensive knowledge and the patience of a saint.

Perhaps I’m becoming less adventurous in my old age - or simply increasingly lazy. But I find that the combination of Windows XP on client PCs supported by a home server running Linux hits a sweet spot that just works for me. I hope Tux will forgive me; my spirit is willing, but my flesh is weak.

what business can learn from open source

2005-08-11T21:23:00.000-07:00

This marvelous essay from Paul Graham hits home on several levels, and expertly weaves humour throughout. A must-read for geeks that feel they are trapped in a Dilbert world!

Here are some of my favourite gems from this essay:

Business still reflects an older model, exemplified by the French word for working: travailler. It has an English cousin, travail, and what it means is torture.

The New York Times front page is a list of articles written by people who work for the New York Times. Delicious is a list of articles that are interesting. And it’s only now that you can see the two side by side that you notice how little overlap there is.

The atmosphere of the average workplace is to productivity what flames painted on the side of a car are to speed.

To me the most demoralizing aspect of the traditional office is that you’re supposed to be there at certain times […] the basic idea behind office hours is that if you can’t make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun.

What Business Can Learn From Open Source [Paul Graham]